National poll finds majority of Canadians are opposed to military conscription if war breaks out.
National poll finds majority of Canadians are opposed to military conscription if war breaks out.
A forthcoming poll finds that although the majority of respondents oppose conscription, all age categories are more likely to support conscription if it is gender-neutral.
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'Twas ever thus. We've imposed conscription exactly twice since Confederation, during the two World Wars. During WWI, it caused riots because Francophones thought the way it was being imposed was inequitable. At neither time did any significant number of Canadian conscripts get shipped out to fight—instead, they took on domestic roles like guarding military posts to free up volunteers to be shipped out instead (I think a few did go overseas in the trailing months of WWII, but it was a pretty small percentage).
In other words, the draft has never been popular here, and likely never will be. And inequity in how it's imposed has been an issue for more than a century. (The nature of the inequity is different this time, but I don't think that matters so much.)
Times have also changed. The information available on our fingertips is showing that things are not as black and white as they seem. Back during the world wars, mass propaganda convinced us to go fight for imperialist reasons (remember, we did not go to war with Nazis over their treatment of the Jews).
It's a lot harder to convince a populace to go to war when it's not clear the opponent is entirely in the wrong.
My grandfathers on both sides of my family Indigenous family were conscripted into the First World War .... they were promised pay, money, land, animals, all they need to build a farm in northern Ontario when they returned. They were gone for over two years ... one never came back, the other was dropped at a train depot near Chapleau and told he could go home .... hundreds of kilometers away in the bush with nothing, no boat, no money and only the supplies he could get together. All the men in his group from our families were like that, some dropped off in the middle of winter, some in the summer, some in the spring run off, others in the fall as winter was approaching. And when they got home, all the money had been taken away from the Hudson Bay Company to pay for imaginary made up 'debts' and the remainder taken by the church for 'donations'. No land, no money, no animals, no supplies .... everyone was suspicious of the church during that whole period because they suddenly had a good supply of farm animals delivered up to them.
When the Second World War came along .... all the old veterans told their sons not to bother because it was senseless and they would get nothing out of it.
When rich people can't get along, they send poor people to fight their battles, while the wealthy also make profit from the event and leave the poor to die everywhere.